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This is a story of Parbati Bishwakarma, belongs to a Dalit (a deprived caste) of Nepal. The Dalit community is an under- privileged community in Nepal. They still have to suffer from various social discriminations and much remains to be done in the area of their empowerment for social and economic empowerment. Furthermore, the situation for a woman in the Dalit community is compounded by even more hardship. The majorities of them are still illiterate, destitute of vicious cycle of poverty and excluded from mainstream of the development. For the majority of the Dalit women, an access to the options for minimum livelihood is still a rare opportunity. Belonging to deprived caste, she did not attend any school, and was living with her husband in a society of the Dalit- a society confined in it. Exposure to outside world was very much limited as the Dalit community is suffering from a significant exclusion from the mainstream. As a Dalit women she did neither have professional skill not access to any credit. Access to information that would empower a Dalit women social, economic and other life was very poor. Adding to the sorrow of Parbati, one day her husband, the only one breadwinner of her family fell ill. They sold her jewelry, their land, and anything of value to afford the costly medical care. When he died, she was left with nothing and had no job skills to earn money to support herself and her four children, aged 4 to 13. Not only did she find it difficult to put food on the table and educate her children, but also her two eldest daughters were approaching marriageable age and she was desperate in need of saving. Arrival of the year 1998, introduced RUPP in Pokhara brining a lot of significant changes in her life. As a result of a successful community mobilization process – including broad-spectrum issues varying from governance, poverty reduction, leadership, gender, to participatory planning, the entire Pokhara municipality is in the process of social transformation. Local communities through Tole/Lane Organizations (TLOs- a grass root level community organization formed by RUPP) are addressing the issues of poverty reduction, infrastructure development and also social development issues. Taking advantage of community mobilization process, Parbati along with many other women attended different trainings, awareness programmes provided by RUPP. The empowerment of Parbati did not stop there, to fight with hand-to-mouth problem resulted from the death of her breadwinner husband she took a loan from RUPP and started her own small business (Vegetable Trading Shop). She has not only repaid her loan to RUPP, but now her monthly take home income has been around NRs. 10,000 per month, which is well above the international definition of extreme poverty. Her life is much smoother and she is proud that she is doing so well on her own. She, once consider as naïve now can talk about issues like gender, HIV/AIDS, enterprise management and also of electronic commerce. Her voices are now considered important not only in TLO but also have a potential to be reflected in the municipal planning. More importantly, she proved that with effective implementation of community mobilization process, social evil like gender discrimination and social exclusion are no longer resistance to empowerment of Dalit Women. Not only many of the Dalit women, but also other women of other communities are following the footstep of Parbati. Parbati as she now represents the mindset of communities that social caste based discrimination and gender discrimination can no longer exclude the female and deprived community from the mainstream of development. |
